by Alice Adams
Just thinking of her own parents, even now, fills SallyJane, literally fills her, with a heavy, familiar, hard-to-name, and quite intolerable emotion. “Terror” and “guilt” are the words that come closest, although she has never really tried to describe what she feels. Certainly not to Dr. Drake, and never to Russ. She thinks of her mother’s tears, her wild, wild sobs, and her streaked red hating face, of her mother’s ugly sagging dark aging body—and of her father’s remote sad elegance. How terribly unhappy she made them both.
Curiously, it does not occur to SallyJane that her parents made her even unhappier than they themselves were—and that they were the stronger, powerful ones.
Talking about her parents does not seem to get her far with Dr. Drake, even when she tries to.
And talking about Russ is not a great deal better, although at least she can tell that Drake is interested. He seems curious, and he asks a lot of questions, some of which SallyJane is unable to answer. How many poems does Russ usually write each month? How much does he usually get paid for a Hollywood script? And so at last SallyJane tells him, “I just don’t know too much about Russ’s work. But you could ask him if you wanted to. I know he’d love to talk to you.” She does not know this at all, but she believes that her saying it had something to do with Dr. Drake’s decision to drive her up to Pinehill.
She does not talk much about her delusion-suspicion about Russ and Deirdre Yates, and that boy looking so much like Russ. She does not want to appear a jealous wife. Delusional. It is all she can do to admit unhappiness. And she does not do that very well. She does not, cannot make it interesting. Russ. Five children. A too large house. Cooking. The weather. Does all that make a normal person unhappy? She is quite sure that it does not. Would not.
Of course the next day it does not snow, how could it? It is a beautiful clear sunny day. All over Southern Pines the sand is bright white, and all the pine needles glistening green.
The first thing that Dr. Drake says to SallyJane (never Brett, not anymore) is about her hair. “Your hair in the sunlight,” he says. “It’s so—so bright. Spun gold.”
So pleased that she is unable to respond (how lucky she washed her hair!), SallyJane smiles, and she gets into his car with him, as, smiling, he nods and opens the door for her. “This is great,” he says. “You know, I feel like a boy on a date. Or maybe a kid just let out of school.”
A good start! (Too good?) But, riding along, SallyJane is almost instantly queasy. Dear God, she may throw up. Carsick, as she was as a child, so often. And how angry they were about that, all her family. As Dr. Drake will be, she knows, if she manages to spoil his day; that was what her mother always said, or sometimes her father, about her spoiling their days. Always about “managing,” as though she had intended to be sick.
SallyJane puts her head close to the window, breathes deeply of fresh air.
“You’re not going to be carsick, are you?” Dr. Drake laughs, as though this were impossible, such a childish thing: grownups don’t get carsick. But he adds, “I can’t have you spoiling my day.” Incredible: the very words. He must have read them in her mind.
Happily he then points out the rolling green golf course where he plays, some men in white knickers, a couple of women in sweaters and skirts and socks and little hats. He asks her, “You ever try golf?”
“No, I never did. There’s no course in Pinehill, and back in Hilton—”
“How about your husband? He much of a sport?”
“No, Russ walks a lot, in fact he’s always walking. These very long walks. He likes to walk at night—”
“Walks at night, oh, does he?”
Is he saying, You goddam fool, don’t you know your husband must be off with some beautiful young woman? What a fool you are!
“I think he composes poetry as he walks,” SallyJane tells the doctor, as though to compound her stupidity. She imagines him thinking: Lord, this woman will believe anything. No wonder she’s gone crazy.
“Poets sure are a different type of folk,” remarks Dr. Drake.
It occurs to SallyJane that Russ would find that sentence really funny, but she’s not at all sure she should save it for telling Russ; it might make him think Dr. Drake was sort of silly, not worth his money.
Dr. Drake grew up in a really small town just north of Hilton, he now tells SallyJane. He says the name and she remembers that once a shabby-looking football team from there came down to play Hilton’s slightly better equipped team. He talks a lot that day about his town, his folks, as he puts it, “two of the nicest old people you’d ever want to meet. Can’t figure out how I came out so crazy, one more living disproof of the theories of Dr. Freud.”
Does he really think he’s crazy? SallyJane is almost reeling from this as she concentrates, still, on not being sick. She decides that he does not at all mean “crazy” in the way that she does when she feels crazy; he means a sort of amiable eccentricity. He likes himself quite well.
The land they are passing now is less flat, less sandy than that around Southern Pines. The narrow white highway surmounts small hills; it cuts through low eroded red clay embankments. It crosses small creeks, brown and swollen with winter rains.
And Clyde Drake goes on talking.
SallyJane manages not to be actively sick. Manages not to spoil his day.
But when she thinks of her fantasies, how she imagined this trip would be—Lord, even imagining snow!—she is so acutely embarrassed, humiliated, that she is sure he must be aware of her feelings. Aren’t psychiatrists supposed to be able to do that, to read minds, or almost? However, today for Dr. Drake seems a holiday from psychiatry.
As he talks on, SallyJane finds her own mind wandering from the car, her thoughts straying out to the fields and the small clapboard houses that they pass, little square boxes up on stilts—she supposes to keep them from the mud and rain in wintertime. Poor colored people mostly live around here; little children and a few stray skinny chickens, a yellow dog, a striped scrawny cat, emerge from the yards—and SallyJane considers the terrible accidents of birth. Born colored and poor, in one of these little houses, what earthly chance do you have? Whereas she, SallyJane Caldwell Byrd, born tall and blonde and passably smart (though she has never been sure of that, despite all those IQ tests and the way the teachers at school talked to her parents), she has messed up everything, her marriage and all her children, she believes. Certainly she has messed herself up, so that she has to go down to a very expensive resort, to a sanatorium for rich alcoholics, where it soon turns out that she is not even alcoholic. Just “undisciplined,” and unhappy.
And what is her unhappiness, compared to that of the woman who is sitting on that porch, say, as they pass? A skinny old woman with enormous dark sunken eyes, with little children all around her, and probably a husband off somewhere looking for work. Unfair beyond words, or thoughts. It makes SallyJane feel crazy, just trying to comprehend this unfairness. And how very crazy anyone else would think she was if she should try to explain these thoughts.
“Well, Russ Byrd, what a really great place you have here! All the feel of an old country house, but so comfortable!”
Standing there in the parking area with her husband and her doctor, the very familiarity of it all is so intense that SallyJane could faint: the sounds of pine boughs, smells of pine and clay, the sunlight on the dark brown shingles of her house.
It has been explained to her—Russ explained—that the children are all off playing somewhere. But as he said this SallyJane suddenly realized how clearly she had expected them to be there. How much she had purely wanted to see them, especially—oh, especially all five of them! Her children. Hurt, without them she feels that she has no function with these two men, and in a listless way she follows Russ, who is carrying her bags into the house.
“… like to lie down for a while—put your feet up?” Russ is asking her hopefully.
And although this is the very last thing she would like, to be alone in her own room for a while, wi
th her own thoughts but without her husband and children, or her doctor, SallyJane says, “Sure, I’ll just go put my feet up for a while.”
She lies rigidly on her bed, listening to the men downstairs, who talk, and talk. Whatever about? Not about her, she is quite sure of that; they are not all that interested in her. But what is the point of this visit, after all? Why is she at home? She was much more comfortable at the sanatorium, SallyJane now thinks. That had become more like home.
So tensely she is waiting, so unrestfully lying there, it is almost as though she were afraid to see her children.
She is tensely braced against whatever will happen next.
20
“Esther will love her house the way you all have it fixed up,” Dolly Bigelow reassures Cynthia.
Cynthia, very distressed, has just confided the fact that Esther is coming over for a visit. “Not to inspect, of course, but it feels like an inspection, you know?”
“It’ll cheer her up,” Dolly insists. “She can’t help but love all this color.” Rather ambiguously she adds, “Of course, Esther never did have what you might call taste.”
“Oh come on, Dolly, the house wasn’t all that bad.”
Cynthia and Dolly have progressed in friendly intimacy sufficiently for Cynthia to feel that small corrections, little disagreements are all right. However, she has noticed that they are never quite all right with Dolly. And she thinks, for the thousandth time, that “Southern” is a language that she cannot possibly ever learn.
“I never said a thing that it was bad.” Dolly draws herself up, though she still smiles. “It never was real pretty. Not homey.”
“But maybe that was the way she wanted it, and she won’t like what I’ve done.” Carefully, Cynthia does not say, “we’ve done,” nor does she dare to mention Odessa.
Esther is briefly in town for a visit to Jimmy, and to her friends, and she has, according to Jimmy, expressed a desire to see their house, ostensibly just to pick up a few things that she left locked up in a downstairs closet. Cynthia of course has said that that was fine with her, perfectly fine—but as she has confided to Harry on the phone, she is scared. “It’s like an inspection at boarding school,” she told him, for no reason whispering into the phone. “Have a big stiff drink before she comes” is Harry’s advice. “Come on, she’s a very nice woman,” he reminds her.
“How’s Odessa doing?” Cynthia now dares to ask Dolly, knowing that this is a dangerous topic these days.
“Oh, uppity as ever. You know what Clifton Lee says is just sure to happen? All the Nigras in town will start working over to the defense plant, and then none of us will have any help at all, and they’ll all just get drunk with their money and have their Saturday night razor cuttings and beating up.”
“I can’t imagine Odessa—” Cynthia begins.
“Oh, can’t you now. Well, you just don’t know that woman the way I do. She’s got a temper—who-eee. And proud? That woman thinks she’s the queen of the jungle, in her mind. You know the truth is, it’s a good thing things didn’t work out with that Lord & Taylor of yours. I’ve got enough with Miz Odessa as it is.”
You sound as though you were talking about a daughter, is what Cynthia thinks, among other things, but manages not to say. One of the lessons she has painfully learned in this Southern year has been do not interfere in or comment on their relationships with Negroes. And try to get used to the way they pronounce that word, their “Nigra.” They are trying to say Negro; she is sure (almost) that that is what they mean to say.
Still, Cynthia braces herself for further argument. “What I’ve been thinking,” she tells Dolly (and as she speaks she notes the Southern slowness in her own voice), “is that maybe we could have this sort of little shop. You know, downtown. We could drive out into the country and buy stuff. From women like Odessa who make things at home, and we could sell them and divide the money with those women. That way we could all come out ahead.”
“You mean things from colored women?” Dolly’s round black eyes sparkle, as though with mischief.
“Well, it wouldn’t be just colored women. More like just country women. Maybe some who don’t have a way to get into town.”
Dolly narrows her eyes, speculating; inner conflict is visible on her face. She is first of all dubious about any business arrangements involving “colored.” (Cynthia is sure she can see this.) But both Dolly’s intelligence, which is considerable, if often submerged in layers of bias and lazy habit, and her greed, also considerable, inform her that this is a good idea. It is something she ought to get in on.
At that moment there is the sound of a heavy car passing by on the road out in front, going fast, too fast, so that both women stare, and Dolly laughs. “We’re like two country women ourselves,” she says. “Watching cars and keeping track of who goes where.”
“I catch myself doing it all the time,” admits Cynthia, wondering if Dolly, too, recognized the passenger in Russ’s car.
As she might have known, Dolly tells her, “That was that psychiatrist fellow, that Dr. Drake. With Russ. I declare, he’s around her all the time! I didn’t know those folks made house calls, did you?”
“Maybe he’s just visiting. I mean, visiting Russ as much as he is Brett, I mean SallyJane.”
Dolly gives her a long look that is full of meaning. “Well, maybe I’d best be getting along now. I’ll let you get on with your getting ready for Harry.”
Harry is coming home for two whole weeks, arriving that afternoon! Driving down all the way from Washington. Cynthia finds herself quite girlishly excited. As soon as Dolly is gone, she washes her hair in the sink, soaping and rinsing it several times with Drene, then towel-drying and putting it all up in pin curls, with her bobby pins (harder and harder to get these days). How Harry hates to see her like this, she smiles to reflect. She covers it all discreetly with a scarf, although it should be dry before Harry could possibly get there.
“I’m never going to do that to my hair!” says Abby, coming in from school with her books and an apple, which she is eating very loudly. “I’m going to wear it long in a braid, and when I get too old for that I’ll wrap the braid around my head.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ve got that all figured out.”
“What time is Daddy coming? Do I have to be here?”
“I’m not quite sure; he said he’d try to make it by dinnertime. And you should be here, you know that.” She hesitates. “Where were you going?”
“Oh, down to the Byrds’. Some of the kids are doing some stuff down there.” Abby scowls. “That doctor’s around there again.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I think Mrs. Byrd must have some kind of a crush on that man.” This entirely out-of-character remark comes accompanied by a similarly uncharacteristic giggle, a combination quite shocking to Cynthia. It is as though Abby had added several years to her age all at once.
She wonders: Did Abby think of all that herself, or did someone, some older person, say it to her? She asks her daughter, “Wherever did you get such a silly idea? Or was it your own idea?”
“I just thought of it,” says Abby, looking both confused and dishonest. So that Cynthia thinks: Deirdre, I’ll bet Deirdre said that to Abby. But what a curious remark for Deirdre to make.
“I have to tell you, I love it. I just really love it,” says Esther Hightower, who is at the moment a guest in her own living room.
Esther, as everyone has told her, looks wonderful. She has had her hair cut short and fashionably permanent-waved (Cynthia takes note: How easy and convenient that would be, she thinks). She has also lost weight. She looks very thin and intense. Dedicated. Young. In a smart black suit with the new long clinging skirt length. She looks very New York. A career woman.
“These colors are wonderful,” she says. “Jimmy wrote me, but I couldn’t quite see it in my mind. In my living room, I mean.” She laughs. “And actually I love your suite at the Inn.”
“Musical houses.” Harry laug
hs, so trim and handsome in his spanking-new Navy uniform. Everyone says this, and Cynthia agrees. He adds, “Maybe people should do it all the time. Or at least more often. We could trade next with the Byrds, don’t you think so, Cynthia, love?”
“Oh. No.” This came out more vehemently than she had meant it to. “I mean I’m sure it’s very nice, but it’s more of a house than I could handle. I don’t know how SallyJane manages.”
“You’ve never been there?” Esther is curious.
“Well, actually not. You know, Brett—SallyJane—has been sick so much. And I don’t think Russ actually likes, uh, much social life.”
“You’re absolutely right there,” Jimmy, the recent Russ Byrd expert, chimes in. “The man really hates it. Interferes with his work, I mostly think. But he seems to pretty much like going round to other folks’ houses. I guess then he can leave when he’s a mind to.”
Jimmy’s speech has become noticeably more country, more rural Southern, Cynthia notes, then thinks, Of course, he’s imitating Russ. And she thinks again with a stab of what she has to recognize as the purest jealousy of Russ and Jimmy working together on Jimmy’s novel—and then she reminds herself, as she has before, that she does not have a novel or even a plan of one that Russ could help her with. She does not have a secret stack of poetry to show him.
What she does have, and what they have all been discussing earlier, is this plan for a country women’s store. Which has run up against what has been to Cynthia the most amazing resistance. Which went like this:
It turned out that Dolly had a cousin who lived way far out in the country, a true country cousin, who made “the most beautiful doilies and cocktail napkins you’d ever want to see.” Dolly had mentioned the proposed store to this cousin, and had also mentioned Odessa and her work. “You mean a store for colored and white together?” the cousin had demanded.
